


That Which Cannot be Mended

by LessThanNovel



Category: Elder Scrolls
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 19:27:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20494034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LessThanNovel/pseuds/LessThanNovel
Summary: A victim of the Knahaten Flu, Eliarta Sacabolis and her family must flee their small village in the Niben Bay to make a trek towards Anvil in the hopes that they'll find refuge. On the way, however, they are betrayed by the members of their caravan out of desperation and in a divisiveness formed between the Nibenese and Colovians. Sold into slavery and eventually transported to Morrowind for trading, this tells the story of Eliarta's clawing her way through her situation, her survival as a victim at the hands of the Telvanni, and her battle to gain her own freedom in the hopes of eventually finding and freeing her mother.Of note: this text will deal with major character death. It will also deal with non-consensual situations, but implied rather than explicit, with a focus on the impact on victims. Passages which expressly deal with this will be marked accordingly.





	1. The Unraveling

**Author's Note:**

> Part I contains: depictions of graphic violence

The harvest was generous that year, with the grain curving prettily around the village and rippling outwards in a great sea of gold. Their place at the edge of the jungle was always starkest when the crops were in full bloom: the wild, untamed depths shored up behind their houses with resolute timelessness, while the fields, pristine and deliberate, waited with laden soil to be plucked and planted and plucked again in an endless cycle of impermanence. She remembered running through those fields with her hands flung out, laughing, braids trailing. Her soft, small fingers would grasp at stray weeds in the hope of finding honeysuckle flowers for a bit of sweetness. She could get lost in the fields as surely as in the jungles, but somehow she always knew she could find her way back again. Sometimes she fancied the idea that she’d be stranded out there until harvest came, and her neighbors and her parents would come scything through, cutting great swathes of gold to get to her, putting her up on their shoulders and spinning around, overjoyed that they’d found her again.

With a good harvest came bounty. It had always been that way, and when the fields were overflowing even those with the stiffest necks and sharpest tongues had a certain lightness in their step. It was more than simply the knowledge that the winter would not bring hunger: there was enough to spare for selling, and selling well, and luxuries would come gliding down the river or rolling along in wagons from those who did the trading. Strange and wonderful pelts from Bruma. Colorful satins and silks from Cheydinhal.

It was Malilda who came carting into the village with her exotic sweetfruits from Leyawiin. She was a stalwart woman, as old as the village itself, it was said, and as stubborn and unyielding as the best of them. Yet she had a softness for the young ones, and as she handed out the colorful bounty she’d brought back with her to smiling, expectant faces, she told fanciful tales of strange vendors who’d crept forth from the Black Marsh itself. How their scales glistened in the sunlight. How their feathers sprouted from their heads. The children listened, and laughed, and jostled one another as they bit into that wonderful fruit.

Malilda was the first to die. It was a shock that ripped through the village. For a week she’d been complaining about her aching bones, but she was old and laughed off their concern. When the coughing started they said it rocked her back and forth with its violence, and the healers forced teas on her as she tried to bat them off with her weathered hands, assuring them that she had survived far worse. This would kill her no more than the rest.

They found her not a day later, her eyes open and staring as she lay in her bed, blood trickling sluggishly from her ears and nose.

The children were not long behind her. Then their parents. Then the healers who wrung their hands and desperately tried to mend something they did not understand. Soon enough the people of the village were avoiding one another outright. Windows were shuttered. Doors that had never known a lock were shut tight. A silence fell over them, void of the laughter that should have come with summer, void of the excited chatter that celebrated their good fortune. Many of them blamed old Malilda herself, and suggested they should not have given her a proper burial. She should be dug up, they said. She should be left for the crows to pick at for what she’d brought down on their heads.

The people began to leave not a full month after the first death. No one could say who left first, precisely, but everyone shook their heads in disgust at the notion. Those most vocal about their disapproval were usually the first to disappear. Quietly, in the night. They didn’t want it known that they’d chosen abandonment. Some of them bore the signs of illness that the others had, though they did their best to hide it. Being shunned was not the only consequence for being infected. Being shunned was the lightest sentence one could get.

It was at night when her mother came to her, candle in one hand, finger held to her lips for silence. Her mother’s lovely face bore shadows of worry, of the hungry look of one spent too long with dread on her shoulders. She took her by the hand and led her towards the wagon that her father had prepared. He sat there at the front, reins in hand, the horse before him jerking its head this way and that and snorting huffily at having been roused at such an hour.

They’d tried to keep it from her, of course. They thought her too young to know, but she’d noticed things going missing steadily over the past few weeks. The essentials. The things they could not leave behind when they took flight.

She sat beside her mother in that wagon, watched her as she gripped that melting candle, watched as the wind whipped at the fragile light of its flame. The village faded into darkness quickly. Most of the hearths were unlit now. Most of them were cold and barren, and there was no telling if anyone would stoke them again.

“Falius,” her mother said, her voice strained.

Her father turned his head slightly, but he kept his eyes ahead of him, steering the horse onwards.

“We’ll wait a while, Falius. Find somewhere quiet a while. Make camp for a few days.” The way her mother looked at her told her she was speaking vaguely on purpose. Her grip on the candle tightened. “It would be best, if we did that. It would be best if we did that before we went into one of the cities. Just in case. Just in case.”

He did not answer her outright, but he dipped his head slightly, the set of his shoulders tense as he clicked his tongue and cracked the reins. Her mother’s gaze fell on her again, and she watched her with a smile that twisted oddly and did not show her teeth.

“Won’t that be fun, Ellie? To sleep under the stars for a while?”

Eliarta smiled back at her, and hoped she managed it better. ‘I did not eat the fruit, mother,’ she wanted to say. ‘I did not play with the other children, mother, just like you said.’ But she said none of those things. She knew the assurances would do no good.

“Yes, momma,” she replied. “I love to see the stars.”

They rode in silence after that, and the night swallowed them.


	2. Chapter 2

The land changed as surely as the people in it, and the further they went the more Eliarta missed home. The season was still ripe for traveling, but soon enough the roads did not boast fellow Nibenese seeking business or fleeing the disease: Colovians became far more abundant. They were a severe people, she thought, and in that they were alien. Their clothing had such little color compared to what they wore, and their skin, for the most part, boasted little in the way of artwork. She’d been too young to choose what images she wanted pressed into her flesh, which ancestors or sacred animal she might wish immortalized there, but her parents bore many such things. Her mother’s arms were a lovely, intricate maze of swirling loops, and her hands bore soaring eagles with wings outstretched. Her father’s skin had always seemed to convey power to her, as unchanging and unfading as he was. The thick black bands of ink that curled over his broad shoulders and up the sides of his neck were as much a part of him as his smile or his brown eyes.  
  
The first village they came to lay on the plains square in the midst of endless fields, with the smell of animals wafting over the rolling hills long before the buildings could be seen. _Silicia,_ it was called, and the sight of it was hope itself. They were haggard from the traveling, weary like saplings uprooted and flung too far by the wind. They needed a place to lay down those roots again. They were full of vigor and excitement as they rode closer and closer; there was laughter, and even those shadows beneath her mother’s eyes seemed to lighten.  
  
They were perhaps fifty paces from the front gate when the first arrow fired. It sunk deep into the front of the cart, missing the horse by inches and Falius’s foot by less. The horse reared, its eyes rolling, its horrible sounds of panic making her ears ring. Eliarta covered them with her hands and grit her teeth as she bounced painfully off boxes of cargo.  
  
“You’ll come no further,” someone said. A man’s voice, gruff with its hardness. Her father sat glaring, struggling for control of the beast, but he’d come to a halt, his hand white-knuckled on the reins as he leaned forward to pluck out the arrow. She could see the sweat already beading on the back of his neck.  
  
“We mean no harm, stranger,” Falius replied. She was surprised he could force himself to sound so cordial. “We seek only-”  
  
“I said you’ll come no further,” the man cut in roughly. Eliarta could see him now. He was larger than her father was, stronger-looking, and meaner. A quiver prickled with arrows over his shoulder, a sword hung at his hip, and already his bow was ready for firing again. “You’ll not be infecting this village, Niben. You’ll be moving on, now.”  
  
His words drew more men to the gate he guarded. It was makeshift, hastily done, the scent of fresh pine wafting thick in the air. They’d made it only recently. Sharpened stumps thrust outwards from it like knives, and she wondered why this wall only looked sinister to her now that she realized its intent.  
  
“We’re not ill,” her father said. She could hear the fury in his voice struggling for control, see the way his hands gripped the reins even tighter. “We waited. We’ve been traveling for weeks, and there’s been no sign-”  
  
Another arrow fired. This time it shot past him and towards her mother, burying itself in a sack of grain beside her knee. It spilled pale and yellow over their colorful skirts, and her mother’s face went white. She moved surreptitiously in front of Eliarta, one hand reaching backwards protectively.  
  
“Are you alright, Lauris?” her father murmured. He did not look back at them. There were four of them now, four men, all armed, all looking ready, even eager, to fire at them.  
  
“I will not miss again,” said the first. The way he looked at them belied a hatred that Eliarta did not understand. “You’ll not be killing our children, Niben swine. You’re not welcome here.”  
  
Lauris shivered, her hand still stretched out to hold Eliarta steady, her fingers curled painfully tight around her arm. “Let’s go, Falius,” she whispered. “We need to go.”  
  
Five bows pointed at them now. Five hard men stared from behind them, and to Eliarta it seemed their faces were all one in the same._Swine,_ they’d called them. _Swine._ She hoped her face looked as hard as theirs did.  
  
Her father clicked lightly and tugged the horse around with great care. They pulled away from Silicia, gave it a berth that took them off the road for a time and into sharp blades of grass tall enough to reach in and dig at their skin.  
  
“We didn’t do anything wrong, momma,” Eliarta said quietly after a time.  
  
Her mother smiled at her sadly, taking up the sackcloth from the ruined bag of grain and mending it shut again. “No, my dear, we didn’t.”  
  
“Then why did they do that? Why did they call us that? We don’t even know them.”  
  
Lauris looked at her with eyes that were equal parts anger and sorrow, with a face that struggled to contain both. Eliarta wished she would stop trying, that she would realize she could take truth. It was past the time to pretend that she was still the child playing in the fields back home.  
  
“Fear,” she answered slowly, “Can make a person do terrible things, love. Fear can make people do very terrible things. And they’re afraid, Ellie. They’re all afraid, and we have to try to understand.”  
  
She did not understand, but she said she did. Over the next few weeks, she watched her mother sew them shirts from what precious supplies of cloth they had left. She made them clothing of dull colors, of greys and browns and faded greens, clothing that covered up her beautiful arms and collars that arched upwards to hide the jagged lines of black that decorated her father’s neck. Their totems and effigies to the gods they’d worshiped so readily at home she hid away, buried beneath vegetables and produce, and Eliarta wondered if they’d be angry with them. If, when next she wanted to pray for a simple thing too small for the ears of the Divines, she would be ignored.  
  
Her parents did not have to tell her to bite her tongue about where they hailed from. She heard the lie from them and she absorbed it, even if it tasted bitter when she told it. She felt plain in that clothing - it scratched at her skin even though she knew it was soft, and she came to resent it. She wanted to take it between her fists and tear it down the middle, to pluck the pretty piercings that used to line her mother’s ears out of that chest buried in the cart and put them back in again. They were beautiful. She was beautiful, and she shouldn’t have to hide it.  
  
Eliarta did none of these things. She remembered how close the arrows had come to their flesh, and the fear was more than enough to overcome her resentment. That she kept buried deep, for later, like seeds in soil.


	3. Chapter 3

When she was younger the days ended in song and magic. Her father’s calloused fingers would somehow become softer as he plucked the strings of his tried and tested lyre, the polished wood of it faded where he gripped the arm. Her first memories were of sitting on her mother’s lap as they listened, clapping her hands or giggling sometimes, or somber and silent when the notes that slipped from the instrument demanded such. Even then, even when she’d barely begun speaking her first words, music possessed that power. It was, in its way, a magic all its own.

Yet it did not hold a candle to her mother’s.

There was the true magic. Lauris’s hands would open, her palms up, and the wisps of gentle spellwork rose like smoke driving skyward. Glimmering and beautiful, with colors that shifted and changed. It would take shapes as Eliarta watched, forming people to dance to the tune of Falius’s songs, or shifting about as puppets on ethereal strings to live out the stories that he or she told. It was always best when her mother was telling the stories, at least in her opinion. Falius was good, but Lauris was gifted. Her voice would take on that lilt of the storyteller, of the narrator full of wizened omniscience as she dictated those characters towards victory or tragedy.

Magic, her mother would say, was in their very blood. The Divines themselves had soaked it into the ground, infused it deeply into every part of Nirn, and then connected it to them in such a way that it could be woven and stretched like thread on a loom. By the time Eliarta was ten, she already knew how to make lights dance, sputtering over her shoulder, so that she could go out at night to feed the pigs. At twelve, she’d started to change those lights into forms, spending hours learning how to force those amorphous, shimmering things into people and animals, crude as they were.

She was fourteen now, and the need to know more tickled at her, nagging and needling. Yet home was gone, and the roads were heavy with travelers, thick with the passage of tired people fleeing a menace that made music and magic both seem worthless. It was lucky that her mother knew the Colovians had no taste for such displays, for they’d seen more than one argument come to blows over a Niben learning that truth through the shedding of blood. As she understood it, her mother’s magic was hated most of all: they claimed it tugged at the mind, that it was the cruelest form of sorcery, the stuff of witches trying to entrap the hearts of good and honest men. It was absurd to her. Eliarta could not understand why anyone wouldn’t want to see the beauty that her mother had to show, no matter what method she used to show it. Surely Lauris would never hurt anyone. She had always been goodness and kindness personified, in her view, and her magic was a reflection of her very soul.

Lauris tried to teach her daughter quietly, when they managed to split off from the others, but there was a futility to it. By the end of the day she was always so weary, and one look at her filled Eliarta with the need to soothe her with platitudes of forced sincerity.

“I will learn tomorrow, mother.”

“There will be another time to teach me.”

“You should sleep now. You’ll be able to teach me better, then.”

They would share a look of understanding, and her mother would settle herself in a corner of their tent, where she could draw some strength from the warmth of Falius’s strong arms.

Traveling became a way of life. The uprooted sapling transformed into the seed from a dandyflower, made for blowing in those winds, adapted to it. The group they traveled with formed a series of rules born not of discussion but of basic need. Those who wished to join them had to walk at least a hundred paces away for three days’ time, to ensure that they had not contracted what they now knew as the knahaten flu. It worked quickly, which was both a blessing and a curse. To catch it was death, pure and simple, to the point that some had taken to ending the lives of the infected swiftly rather than let them suffer. The efficacy with which it killed made it easy to determine who already bore the disease. There were times when would-be companions who walked at a distance would gradually fall behind them, stalled by the sluggish fatigue of someone who was sick.

Once Eliarta saw a man traveling by horse suddenly fall from the animal’s back. A woman came screaming up to him, trying to rouse him, shaking him and pleading. It was a simple cold, she insisted, her voice breaking. Nothing more than that. Nothing more.

Their party moved on somberly, not bothering to look at her. The man did not get up again.

While the summer held, trapping was bountiful enough, and the only suffering was the soreness of feet from the walking. A camaraderie developed among them, held together by the strength and safety brought in numbers and the common enemy they left at their backs. Around the fires there was laughter, sometimes, and the telling of stories, and the sharing of losses suffered by almost all. Sometimes her father would pull out his lyre, and his music would offer some solace to their companions, enough that Eliarta could forget about the men at Silicia.

Even so, she did not forget that her mother still did not adorn her ears or show her arms, and that her father’s clothing still hid his throat like armor against the jaws of wolves.

As autumn came and the whispers of winter hovered at its fringes, game became more scarce. The fields around them were hardly ripe for the picking, and whatever stores they had cumulatively brought with them were withered down to husks and hard bread. Ripples of unease went through them, held up by a single hope: Anvil. It was said there was a place for the refugees in Anvil, that if they merely passed the allotted time in quarantine, they’d be allowed in. They could stop drifting then, and build anew. A warm hearth. A stable place to lay their heads. New neighbors with whom they could build lives and homes and the families they’d lost.

But winter hovered, and the cold bit down, and their trudging became filled with the whisperings of despair. Of fear.

On the day when the first snow speckled the ground in white, they passed what Eliarta took to be a signpost from afar, with some odd animal clinging to its stout beam. As they got closer, her mother gasped and tried to pull her deeper into the wagon, to cover her eyes with her hand and hold her against her chest. It was too late for that. She’d already seen, but later, she would lie and tell her she hadn’t.

The dead man was half rotted away. His hands and feet were nailed to the wood, his eyes plucked free by carrion birds. It was impossible to miss the jewelry he wore, the vibrancy of his torn clothing, nor the rolling images that adorned his legs and arms. She couldn’t say whether or not he’d been infected, but it mattered little. There’d been no mercy in that killing, and the way those nails dug into his flesh, it was all too clear he’d been left alive there to struggle until death finally came for him.

There was a rippling murmur among the group as they gave the body a wide berth. It wasn’t clear how they felt at first - the shock of such barbarity was enough to lend hesitation. It was only when the last of them put the sight at their back that someone finally spoke.

“Serves them right,” she murmured. Eliarta turned her head and saw the speaker sitting proudly, her back straight and dark eyes glinting as she stared ahead. “Serves them right. They did this to us. They deserve no better.”

Ascent rippled back through their caravan, though some ducked their heads and furrowed their brows, uncertain whether to feel ashamed.

Her father sat unaffected, his eyes fixed forward as he drove them on.

“Serves them right,” he echoed softly, giving a nod of his head. “Serves them right.”

Lauris gently brushed her fingers through her hair, and Eliarta knew to stay silent.


	4. Chapter 4

Often she would hear the prayer on fervent lips for a gentle winter. People would trudge with heads down and faces red from the cold, murmuring to themselves and to the gods about sparing them at least in this. After all they had suffered, it would be such a small task, surely, to draw back the clouds from the sky, just a little. To let the rays of sunlight trickle down over them, warm their skin, let them remember that not everything had been lost. As the kindness of autumn was beaten down by cold rain and winds growing more and more bitter, the prayers became less frequent. They’d received their answer, or perhaps they’d merely been ignored. The Divines, surely, were too large and important to turn their eyes upon the needs of so very few.

And so the snows came harder. People made makeshift shoes from twigs and twine, but even that couldn’t keep their feet above that chilling whiteness for long. The largest of the horses and oxen were put at the front of the line, an effort to plow through faster, to let everyone else manage to press on with less obstruction. It was barely effective, and their progress grew slower by the day. The loss of color killed the desire for anything but to move forward towards the piddly wish that they would be there soon, that the months they’d spent on the road would be worth it and soon there would be closed doors to hide behind.

Those villages and towns that would admit them became scarcer. Worse, they had next to nothing to trade. A few tattered hides from when the land was still bountiful, perhaps. Bits and pieces of heirlooms from those who’d clung to them tight-fisted until hunger threatened. All notion of sharing abated, and the families began to draw into themselves, coveting whatever resources they had left. They had their own to take care of. The time for charity was long behind them.

Eliarta didn’t know the name of the first boy who died. She did remember his face, recall that he’d always been a sickly thing, right from the onset. The caravan had forced that family to travel a week away from them rather than the usual three days, certain that the look of him meant that he carried the flu. His mother was a flighty creature who tutted and fretted over him constantly, her hands like startled doves as she straightened his hair and tucked his clothing tighter and tighter around him to keep him warm.

It was one of the few times they came to a shuddering halt. They huddled against the wind as some of the men dug deep into the snow, then into the earth. The sounds of his mother’s wailing pierced over the winds that buffeted them, and her hands, straining like claws, had to be pried off of her son’s corpse so that he could be lowered into the ground.

There was silence at first as they piled the dirt over him. Silence and grim faces, staring downwards, looking at his emaciated form. They saw it as an omen, she was certain. A look into the inevitable future that would come.

“This is what they’ve done to us.”

The voice was as sharp and cutting as the chill around them. Heads turned slowly, lifted upwards, searched. It was the same woman who’d condemned the man hammered to the signpost. Her chin was lifted with pride, and her dark eyes glinted even now. Avinta. Eliarta knew her now. Her name was frequently whispered among them, and more often than not she could be seen at the head of their caravan, trudging before the others, sometimes lifting one of the little ones up onto her powerful steed to give them a reprieve from the unforgiving terrain.

“This,” she said again, loudly, her voice carrying. “This is what they have done to us. This is what they’ve brought us to.” A laugh, sharp like the crack of a whip. Her lip curled in a sneer. “It was not enough that they drive us from our homes. It was not enough that they bring their disease to kill us, our mothers, our fathers, our children. No. Now they leech from us, like parasites, until there is nothing left for the weakest of us. The frailest of us. This. This is what we have come to.”

Around her, she could see men and women stand up straighter, and that look in Avinta’s eye began to catch like fire. Malice. Anger. Jaws tightened and fists clenched at their sides, though no one moved.

“Shall we put up with it?” she asked, looking at each of them. The sneer remained on her face, and her gaze traveled over their haggard features until finally it found a target. Her eyes became daggers, and she raised her finger to point. Accusation. Judgement.

Two young women stood there, not much older than Eliarta was, huddled to one another. Sisters, by the look of them. They’d either not been wise enough to hide what made them distinctly Niben or they hadn’t had the resources. They looked back at Avinta, as miserable as the others, hollow-eyed and silent.

The fear only showed when Avinta’s words brought the scrutiny of the others, heads turning to stare with the hunger of people needing someone to blame.

“Why should we?” Avinta said then, her voice sounding almost intimate, lower, and it was clear she only addressed those in that audience she considered to be her people. “Why should we tolerate this? Drive them out. At the very least, drive them out. Purge these parasites from our flesh, so that we might-”

“I think that’s quite enough.”

The Niben women shivered. The heads that had turned to bore eyes into them shifted, now, as a tide shifts, and faced Eliarta’s mother.

“Ask yourselves if this is what we have been brought to,” she said. Her voice was just as commanding as Avinta’s, and she addressed the other woman unflinchingly as she stepped forward, out of the mass of clustered faces. “Ask yourselves if this is what you wish your legacies to be. Are we animals to bite off our own legs to escape the trap? We are Colovians. We are men and women of honor. Of strength. Of perseverance. Do we truly shatter so easily?”

Falius stiffened where he stood, and it seemed to Eliarta that he held his breath. He could no doubt sense the same as she. The taste of her mother’s magic was in the air, subtle as silk, soft as the web of a careful spider. It was just enough to try to sway them, to twist them towards her words, to pry at the regrets and feelings that must surely exist somewhere within them. Surely they would not notice. Surely they would not know.

The two women who’d been the targets of Avinta’s wrath looked at Lauris, but neither said a word to betray her.

Avinta’s dark eyes found her mother. She, too, stepped forward, and suddenly the grave around which they’d gathered was a ground for battle. “And what honor,” she answered, “Do they have? What honor in their selfishness when they sought sanctuary behind our walls? When they hid their afflictions from us, knowing that it would lead our deaths? How much do you think they cared for our lives then? Why should we put their needs before ours, when it is so clear how little they value us?”

Uncertainty blossomed on the faces of many who watched, though not all. It seemed just as many remained hardened, their lips tight together, white as the snow beneath their feet. Her mother was not used to using magic of this magnitude. At her sides, her hands trembled with the onset of fatigue. Already the effort was draining her, and Eliarta heard her father murmuring at her side.

“Come back, Lauris,” he was whispering, low enough that the wind took the words away before the ears nearby could hear them. “That’s enough, now.”

“So you would become like them?” came Lauris’s reply. Her mother’s skirts whipped around her, her hair spun wild about her face. Her words remained strong, and she stood her ground. “You would choose now to demean yourselves, to lower yourselves to their level?” Her tongue flicked over her lips as she realized the error in her words. “We are better than them,” she mended. There was only the slightest pause. “We are stronger, and we are almost there. There is no need to become beasts now, when we have come so far with heads held high as men.”

Eliarta turned her head and realized that the Niben women had faded into the crowd, ducking themselves behind the hope of anonymity. Even that whipping wind seemed to hold its breath as a silence swept over them. Slowly, steadily, the uncertainty rippled over more and more faces, and Avinta could see it. It was plain in the way she took a step back, shaking her head softly like a horse trying to refuse the bit.

“We hold fast,” she said. “For now, we hold fast. But one more life, one more to fall, and we cut the fat from our ranks. We will survive. We will survive, one way or another.”

They dispersed slowly after that, and the trudging began again as they left the body of the boy to rest and freeze beneath the churned earth. Falius said nothing, though the hard lines of his body said there would be words later. Words as hard he looked.

After the wagons had started well into the road and their progress was steady, Avinta came towards them, her horse snorting white clouds and face fixed with a false smile.

“Your wife has such a silver tongue,” she murmured. “I doubt I’ve ever seen its like.”

Lauris slept oblivious to her, overcome by the weariness of such a spellwork, and her form curled beneath the blankets in the wagon was not missed by the woman’s discerning eye. She said nothing, but Eliarta saw the way her gaze scoured thoughtfully over it.

“She’s a woman of conviction,” Falius replied, sparing Avinta only the barest glance. “And she has always had a soft heart.”

“A silver tongue, a soft heart, and a pretty face,” she replied. For a moment, she caught Eliarta’s eye, and a chill went through her as sure as winter itself.

She knew.

“A credit to her people,” Avinta said softly. Another false smile, and she heeled her horse away, surging back to the front of the line.

They rode onward, Eliarta curling around her mother and stroking her pale face, her father wringing his hands around the reins.


	5. Chapter 5

When she got her first glimpse of the city, Eliarta darted to the front of the wagon beside her father and stood stone-still, staring with wide eyes and a dropped jaw. She could hear her father laughing quietly, telling her to get down, but his words held neither heat nor conviction. Never had she seen such a sprawl of houses or buildings. How, she wondered, did they manage to get them to be so tall? Surely the kiss of a passing wind would send them toppling in on themselves. She couldn’t fathom it.

The land around Skingrad had been turned into an expanse of treeless fields, and she could only imagine what it looked like when it wasn’t covered in snow. Farmhouses speckled here and there, thatch roofs woven tight against the cold. Men and women strolled by behind fences that stretched long and high and held in more animals than Eliarta had ever seen in one place. Some of them peered towards their tired procession, though not many actually bothered to approach. The few exceptions came forward tentatively, hovering some distance away either on foot or horseback, coming alongside over the hard packed snow long since pounded down by the passage of countless others. The bold asked for news of the world outside. How far had the flu traveled? What villages had been affected? Did they know how many were dead?

Eliarta envied them. She wished she were so ignorant of what happened. She wished she had those tall fences and the great city stretching out like some marvelous beast, too large and too bountiful to be felled.

The gates of Skingrad were grand, hewn from stone. The guards before them were armored so fully that Eliarta thought surely nothing could harm them. A bear could maul those men and its claws would do nothing but skitter uselessly against the steel. From a distance they raised their lances and pointed them at the caravan in a fashion that was both threat and warning, and in a flash of fear Lauris wrenched her from where she’d stood at her father’s side and tucked her down behind the shelter of their depleted cargo. The smell of her perfume was suddenly sharp as she covered Eliarta with her body, and she could feel her mother’s hands quivering softly. Gooseflesh rose on her arms at the memory of arrows thudding into the cart, and she wrestled, wanting to reach out and grab at her father in turn, but Lauris held her firmly as one of the guards spoke up, his voice carrying with it a note of weathered authority.

“If you wish to trade, you may send in ten of you. Only ten. They will be subject to inspection to ascertain whether or not they have the flu. If they do, you will be sent on your way without entering Skingrad. Those are the terms.”

The words broke over them in a wave, deep and sure. Their numbers had risen considerably, thirty families all with gaunt faces and tired eyes. There were murmurings amongst them, but none were foolish enough to suggest they try to force their way through. Even if it were possible and they had the arms, Skingrad was not their goal. This was only a stop on the road. The only reason they’d come was desperation and the need to get reprieve from winter’s scarce pickings.

Out of the murmuring rode Avinta, tall in her saddle, straight-backed and sure as ever. “As is only prudent, sirs,” she called back. “I elect myself to be one to enter the city. I subject myself to your inspection, as is due.”

She turned then, her eyes searching the crowd. A smile split her lips and warmed her eyes as she looked upon the others. Raising her hand, she began to select people with the point of a finger, and the men and women she picked walked out of their uncertain throng with a renewed note of surety.

“We should all be accounted for,” Avinta said, and her pointing finger fell upon those Niben women she’d singled out before. A surprised hush fell over them all, but her smile was unwavering. “A show of good faith. We must begin to trust somewhere, and that begins now. We have long yet to travel.” The woman’s gaze found Eliarta’s mother, and fixed there for a moment. “We are, after all, men and women of honor.”

Approving words could be heard as the two stepped forward, but Eliarta could see that the women’s faces were painted with confusion. Lauris watched the group that’d been picked march closer to the gates, where a small tent stood white against stone and snow. They disappeared into an opened flap, following what looked to be a healer dressed in coarse furs. A belt of alchemical vials glinted dully around her waist.

The moments dragged by. A tension lingered over them, as though they all held their collective breath, eyes straining to see. More than one face shifted towards the guards, wary, but the men merely stood at attention now, observing but evidently not seeing a need to continue the threat that’d brought them all to a standstill.

When Avinta stepped out of the tent again and mounted her horse, the breath they’d held and the tension in the air evaporated. Even Eliarta felt relieved, and began to wonder if her mother’s words had truly influenced the woman. Perhaps her heart was not without compassion after all.

She peered curiously at Lauris, but her mother only watched as that small procession sliced from their caravan entered the gates. She could not read what she was thinking, but the relief that even now stirred the others to excited conversation did not touch her. Her shoulders remained tense.

Hours passed by, and to Eliarta they flew. The notion that soon they would have fresh supplies invigorated them. People with shoes worn through suddenly had a chance to relieve the blisters on their feet. Mothers and fathers who’d grown tired of telling their children there would be no dinner watched the gates attentively. Over the weeks of travel, Eliarta observed as Avinta collected notes on who had what, accounting for anything of value that still remained in the wagons. At first many of the others had been leery of sharing that information, but she’d offered assurances to them, telling them that tallying what they had was only for the best, and would let them do business in the towns and cities faster.

She’d never stopped by her parent’s cart to ask such questions.

These thoughts didn’t plague Eliarta for long. There was still enough of a child in her that the games of tag forming amidst the wagons drew her focus. She tapped her mother on the shoulder lightly, but Lauris seemed to know what she wanted. She only smiled and nodded, but the smile was tight, and the nod too tense.

Still, it felt right to remember she was young for those few hours. Sometimes she wondered why there weren’t already lines in her face, why her hands weren’t more calloused from the hard work of flagging along the Gold Road towards safety. She felt old, old in her bones even if her flesh didn’t show it, and it was that ache she forgot as she chased the other children, laughing, hands reaching out and grasping for a hold. She was one of them. She was not a Nibenese who hid herself among Colovians, she was just one of them, one and the same. Accepted.

She knew that Avinta and the others returned when a cheer rose up and then swelled towards the back of the caravan. She whirled, abandoning the game, running back towards where Falius and Lauris were both sitting at the front of the cart and observing with those strange, flat faces. Climbing up again, she could see those chosen people burst from the gates - followed by two wagons full of food and supplies. The jubilation spread even to her then, and she danced in the cart, laughing, reaching out to shake her parent’s shoulders as though to bring them to life again, to spread her joy into their unmoving forms.

“They aren’t with them, Ellie,” Lauris murmured. “No, Ellie. Watch. Learn. Focus.”

Eliarta froze, cold washing over her. Her mother had never spoken to her that way. It wasn’t meanness that she heard, but Lauris had always wanted to cling to her youth, to see her as only ‘her daughter,’ someone to be coddled. Protected.

Something had been broken, even if she didn’t yet know what. The people surged towards those laden wagons, carrying their own goods with them, eagerly passing over what Avinta had offered and leaving it behind to be taken back into the city. All the while Avinta stood at the forefront, letting the others see her, letting them know that it was she who had orchestrated this. They’d been right to trust her. She’d shirked none of them. All of her meddling and prying was always for their own good - if there ever was a doubt, it was gone now.

But there were eight. Only eight of their number had come back out of those gates. Eliarta could see it now. She could also see how Avinta’s eyes drifted towards where they were, picked them out of the crowd, and fixed them with that smile.

“We can’t stay, Lauris,” Falius murmured. “We must go, as soon as we get the chance, we go.”

Lauris stared forward, her hands curling white-knuckled into her skirts. “We can’t,” she replied. “You and I well know that we won’t survive out there alone, and this city will not take us. We must keep going. We will be vigilant. We have no choice.”

Her father grit his teeth, but he did not argue. He’d heard the wolves at night enough, heard bears or worse snuffling about in the cold. She told the truth, even if it was a difficult truth to swallow.

When the trading was done, the caravan continued. Spirits were lifted, and laughter punctured what had been a tortured drudgery for so long.

They rode at the edge of the procession, Eliarta crouched in the back of the cart, hugging her legs. She was not one of them, she knew that now.

She would never be.


	6. Chapter 6

Watch. Learn. Focus.

She did.

She watched her mother flit like a silverfish through the caravan, all smiles and charm, catching snippets of information that she wasn’t meant to hear and playing it off with a graceful shrug and a flick of her wrist. Lauris saw things that others either did not or simply did not care to. She saw them from the first moment those wagons rolled out of Skingrad with a bounty in exchange for rags and pauper’s clothes. They called it good fortune, a gift from the Divines, a demonstration of Colovian good will. She accepted these explanations with those smiles, with that charm, unruffled until she turned away, composed until all they could see was her back and the wind stirring at the dark waves of her hair. That was when Eliarta, too, saw what others did not. The shift in her gait, the way her brows furrowed, and the worry that lingered in her eyes until they met hers. It evaporated, so much fog on a midsummer morning, but she’d seen it all the same.

In the mornings her father would tie down whatever cargo they had left in the back of the wagon. Their supplies grew sluggishly, for most of the people still thought of them as part of the caravan, as a family uprooted from the same ground. Her father was not without his own wit, and the music from his lyre stirred hearts, brightened faces and opened hands. Avinta did what she could to keep their bellies empty, but they were not without other means of providence. As the snow continued to fall and the road ahead loomed long under a grey sky, they managed to keep their heads up. To persevere, always moving forward, never looking back.

But in the mornings her father tied down the cargo, nice and tight, and in the evenings he checked the bonds, to ensure that nothing would be lost if he had to lash the horse into a run.

She saw things they might have missed otherwise. The eight that Avinta had chosen to take into the city with her watched them with eyes full of hunger, a wolf’s hunger, a winter wolf left too long without a hare. Five men and three women, all of whom spent most of their evening meals by Avinta’s fire. Where they went there were whispers, and where those whispers bled that expression infected others, a sickness that Eliarta saw even if she didn’t know the cause. The hunger, the watching, waiting for something that she knew was coming, that her father and mother clearly knew was coming. There was a hole in her learning there, a vital knowledge she could not yet grasp at. How was she to brace for what she didn’t know or understand?

They could not prepare. They grasped for hand and footholds in a cliff too sheer for climbing.

That night, the night of the fall, her mother came into their tent pale as the snow itself. Her breath fogged the air, and her father looked up at her over the coals of their slowly dwindling fire. He’d been ready to stoke it again. They had to be careful. Fuel was scarce.

“We need to go,” Lauris said. Her breathing was wild, her eyes wide. The fierceness in her voice made her words a snarl.

“We cannot,” Falius replied softly. “We must stay. You said yourself. We will not survive out there, with the wolves-”

“There are wolves enough here,” she snapped at him. Her lips pulled back from her teeth. She was frightened, Eliarta realized. Terrified. She had never seen her mother terrified before. “Worse. Jackals ready for the picking of bones. They did not kill them, Falius.”

He froze, staring at her in that half-light, at her fearsome face and the shadows cast upon it. “What, then?” he asked.

Hesitation. Her mother’s eyes found hers, and she watched her features harden. There was no turning back now. She was a child no longer.

“Sold,” she answered. “They sold them. They found someone in Skingrad who peddles in flesh. Their flesh is what has filled their bellies. Filled ours.” Her eyes gleamed in the firelight with tears not of sorrow, but of rage. “Slavery, Falius. Slavery.”

The silence that followed was short lived. Lividity traced the contours of her father’s face, drawn into a grimace. “These are no Imperials,” he rasped. His hands took up loose earth and tossed it over that fire, and the cold around them grew deeper. Eliarta hardly felt it. “These are no men. We go, Lauris. We go now.”

They took the tent. They should have left the tent. It slowed them down, but they would have frozen without at least that meager covering. In silence they took it down, but the silence was not deep enough. In the darkness they could see others, some still around the fire, faces obscured by distance and the blackness barely interrupted by a moon and stars covered in opaque clouds. No one moved at first, and she could hear her mother praying under her breath as she worked. To the Divines. No smaller god would do, not for this. Not tonight. She prayed for deliverance from a higher power and hoped those eyes, for just an instant, would turn towards her.

The Divines did not hear her.

“The leech crawls in,” Avinta murmured. Her voice cracked open that silence, cracked open the night itself. “It burrows in deeply, and when it has drunk its fill, it seeks to go its merry way. Take the bounty and make more of its brood, no? Such is the way of things.”

Out of that darkness faces appeared in full behind the flickering fire of torches. More than eight, now. Twelve of them, their faces set in stone, their eyes as hard. They held bows in tight fists, wore swords at their hips, and their bodies strained with the urge for violence.

“I do not think that will be acceptable,” Avinta continued. She sat as she ever had atop her horse, head high, full of pride. “You will pay the price for what you have done to us. The loved ones lost. Stolen. You pay that price now.”

Hands were suddenly on Eliarta, hard hands gripping her. Her mother threw her into the back of the wagon with a cry, and Falius’s whip snaked out hard over the horse’s head. The animal’s shriek of surprise echoed over the camp, and they surged forward, running, racing half-blind. Eliarta careened in the wagon, holding on desperately, but Lauris had her, Lauris held her. She would always be safe with her. Always.

Shouts followed hot on them, chasing them over the snow. The wagon could go nowhere but the road, and so down the road they shot, hoping to catch them off guard, hoping that the horse would be able to run faster than they could catch up. A sound tore through the air, a whistling so like music, and with a cry she found herself pressed against the bottom of the wagon beneath her mother, beneath the scent of her, beneath her shouts of alarm.

The wagon began to move erratically. The horse whipped its head this way and that, rearing, tearing at its restraints.

There was a gurgling sound, water over pebbles, water in a man’s throat. Lauris screamed, and Eliarta did not need to look to know. She knew, yet she looked anyway. She saw and she learned, and she felt numb.

Her father sat there dying, his last breath fogging the cold air white, the arrow gleamed dully in the murky glow of the moon. Gleaming with steel. Gleaming with his blood. The fletching poked out from the back of his neck like the scruff of some spiny beast. His grip on those reins had fallen, and already his eyes were glazed as they started forward, beyond seeing, beyond caring, beyond pain.

“Take the horse, Ellie,” her mother said. She’d stood and moved away from her, though she hadn’t felt her move. She could feel and see nothing but Falius before her, dying. “You take the horse and run, as fast as you can, as far as you can. Run, Ellie, and do not look back.”

“But moth-”

Lauris whipped her head around, her eyes blazing rage, her features contorted with such a fury that for a moment she understood their fear of her, of the magic she could wield.

“Run,” she snarled, and the command lacing her voice plunged into her mind. She found herself obeying against the instinct that was shouting in the back of her head, clawing for purchase. She should stay. She should help her. She could not abandon her mother.

She cut her hands on the bindings that held the horse to the cart as she tore them free. It reared again, but she had a grip on it, on the reins, and she hauled down just long enough to scramble into the saddle. She could not look back. She tried, her mind willed her arms and legs to wrench the creature around so that she could take Lauris with her, so that they could ride together in the night, but nothing would listen. Instead, her heels found purchase in its hide and she surged forward, the wind biting, the wind whipping and tearing at her.

Behind her she could feel the magic building. She could feel it building to a height she’d never sensed before, not beautiful and kind but malevolent, dark, ferocious. The fear was there like a taste, a hint of blood on the tongue, its scent on the wind. Her heart beat violently in her chest and she realized she was screaming, as surely as the men behind her were screaming, a chorus of terror that Lauris ripped from their throats in one last demonstration of her boundless fury.

Tears sprang into her eyes and froze against her face. Her throat ached with the need to cry. When the screaming stopped and her mother’s magic faded, the absence of the sound left her ears ringing. She wanted to hear it. As long as she heard it, she knew her mother was alive, she would be alright. She could come back and find her.

When the sound tore through the air again, whistling, whipping, she prayed that the arrow would hit her. It exploded in the horse’s leg instead, and she could see the spray of blood, black like ink over the snow. The animal stumbled, and there was the visceral sound of snapping as its legs broke, as its speed took it barreling into the ground and her along with it. She tumbled from the saddle, rolling, flying, and before she hit the ground she thought it’s alright, I’ll be with them now.

Her head hit first. Stars exploded in her vision.

Darkness came in truth, then.


End file.
